Book reviews: Haiku by Robert Crawford | A Wee Bit More Zen by Alan Spence
Robert Crawford goes in search of the “Ah-ness” of the haiku in his latest book, while Alan Spence’s new haiku collection combines comedy with genuine profundity, writes Stuart Kelly
Robert Crawford’s sagacious and always curious new book about Haiku has a subtitle which of course is cleverly self-referential: “How the modern world / Came to fall in love with small / Poems from Japan”. The introduction also reveals a marked scepticism towards the form. Seamus Heaney referred to it as “the pestilential form”; James Merrill cites an unnamed editor as saying “reading 500 haiku in a month was like being nibbled to death by goldfish”. One word which is often bandied around when the five-seven-five form first impinged on the Western aesthetic consciousness was “Lilliputian” which has a patronising air, but also a buried feeling that, like Gulliver’s tiny antagonists, they are really rather annoying. Like midges. Crawford’s book excels in charting the different reaction of Western poets – and not just Anglophone ones – to the works of Bashō, Issa, Busan, Shiki, and others. It therefore has a stereoscopic quality, which is especially useful as one question recurs frequently: to what extent are Japanese haiku (or tanka, or senryu) ever translatable? And if there are rules, must non-Japanese versions conform to them?
There are rules, and they can broken with impunity. Perhaps the most famous “haiku adjacent” text in English is Ezra Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro” which reads, in its entirety, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Crawford diligently shows how Pound cut and cut and edited and edited to reach the final version – as the biographer of TS Eliot, he is well acquainted with Pound’s capacity for stringency. In a way it reminds me of the statues of Giacometti or the mobiles of Alexander Calder; a radical paring. But to look at Pound’s poem as a haiku, some things are clear. It has a title, whereas the traditional haiku does not. It is 19 syllables over two lines, not 17 over three. There is no kigo or reference to the seasons (unless the “wet” and “petals” are a nod at a blustery spring); nor is there a kireji, an almost untranslatable term usually translated as “cutting word”, a kind of fulcrum or apposite ending depending on whether it appears in the second or third line. Again the disjunction between “crowds” and “petals”, at a push, might count as the kireji.
Some of the most fascinating material here concerns the cross-fertilisation of cultural ideas between Japan and the West. Yone Noguchi emerges as a key and ambivalent figure, whose collection of essays, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, established academic credibility to the form (he lectured at Oxford under the invitation of Robert Bridges, then poet laureate), but whose own Japanese work received lukewarm praise, whose earlier work was haunted by accusations of plagiarism and whose Japanese nationalism during World War Two tarnished his reputation.
On the other side we have a poet like Amy Lowell, who rather cornered the market to the chagrin of her peers – personally I think her collection What’s O’Clock has one of the best titles, and perhaps, to coin a word, the most haikuey. There are more esoteric and rewarding avenues, such as Richard Wright’s use of the haiku for race conscious poetics, and (despite Rilke) the phenomenal difficulty of German language haiku. If your language creates agglutinative nouns – say, “Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit” for food allergy – 17 syllables disappear like a frog into the pond of the famous haiku.
One of the delights of this book, as well, is seeing how different authors attempt to “English” haikus. The very fact that so many versions of “In May who can say / Is it Uyeno’s bell / Or Asakusa’s?” is a kind of testament to the fascination.
Crawford cites Kenneth Yasuda’s “Ah-ness” of the haiku, which I think captures the unique quality of such verse. “Ah-ness” seems to cover epiphanic realisation, plangent acceptance, and even the jolt of comedy all at once. It is a feature immediately recognisable in Alan Spence’s new collection A Wee Bit More Zen, even down to its chirpy, winking title. There are classical haiku here alongside more concrete forms and “found” poems from snatches of conversation – such as “It shouldn’t be like this. / It shouldn’t but it is”. Spence balances genuine profundity with the kind of comedy typical of senryu (I liked “God save us / from religion” especially). Spence also includes found poems “mined” from work by other poets, a kind of recasting: for example, “that old thorn bush / amazed by / its one flower” is chiselled from Norman McCaig; “the whiteness / of these waters / is simple”.
Spence acknowledges and Crawford discusses how RH Blyth “sampled” English texts for haiku-esque ends, and it seems a form particularly suited to the age of Instagram. One I came across excavates something truly beautiful from one of the most chilling contemporary novels, The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes: you would not think “She would disappear / folded like origami / into her own dreams” would emerge from a book about a psychopathic, misogynistic time-traveller.
PS: I was disappointed that Alec Finlay is only mentioned as the editor of Atoms of Delight since his collections Not Sealions but Lions By the Sea and Mesotic Memory strike me as full of "Ah-ness".
Haiku, by Robert Crawford, Yale University Press, £20; A Wee Bit More Zen, by Alan Spence, Luath, £8.99.
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